Analysis to follow and it isn't pretty. There are lots of lessons here.
Greg Royal is one of the original founders of Cistera Networks and has been the chief technology officer/EVP since 2001. He has more than 20 years of IT sales, marketing and management experience in New Zealand, Australia and the US. He also has significant experience in designing and deploying large scale IT systems including experience in financial services, government, education and retail.
Contact him.
Convergence G2 archive.
The opinions expressed in this Weblog are those of the writer and may not represent the opinions of Network World.
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Talk to me about that,
Talk to me about that, please!
Thanks
I just signed up last week with SunRocket
Good thing I paid with the credit card. I found their service fantastic. Oh well.
Just Posted
Based on my opinion just posted lengthy analysis
Geez, I am sorry to see them go.
I used SunRocket in 2004 but had to let them go because of poor quality sound and dropped calls.
Two months ago they extended to me a free trial to try their services again and I hopped on board. Their service was 100% better and I was looking forward to a long-term relationship with them.
Where do we go from here? I know there are a ton of VoIP's out there but who do we trust?
Sorry to see you go SunRocket.
Something about VoIP
I work at a VoIP provider and we have dozens of companies like Sunrocket that buy PSTN termination from us as well as trunks and who knows how many minutes. The problem with companies like Sunrocket and some of the other smaller fish is, they never really had an infrastructure in place. I mean a true blue carrier switch, SBC, switch based infrastructure. So from my perspective, I see them as nothing more than re-sellers.
In the company I work for, we have three network carriers, and we do our own PSTN termination which means we aren't dishing out fees to someone else to do what we can do. This allows us to have companies like Sunrocket farm out their work to us while most of the times we literally do nothing but keep an eye on things and reap the benefits.
On the other hand, we tend to do a lot of managed VoIP PBX systems for SoHos, Fortune500 companies which is where I think companies like Sunrocket lacked. Home users are a losing business and this is why:
Home user @ 29.99 per month... Home user calls cust. support 2x a month for networking problems unrelated to the VoIP company but rather their ISP.
VoIP company eats the salary of those assisting these customers. 200,000 customers calling about their DSL, Cable being down once a month for say fifteen minutes per call, or lets be even more fair say a 1 minute call... 200,000 minutes lost on issues that had nothing to do with the VoIP provider. Let's be even more fair and lop this down to 10,000 users who lost DSL or Cable service... 10,000 minutes in lost salary revenue.
Its a tough field, but to depend on the home user, to Sunrocket I say "suckers...". They had a lousy model to begin with. They went in KNOWING they were going to lose, and still went ahead with a losing business plan.
Just posted new analysis
I think that hubris played a big part. I don't think they thought hard enough about the problem and that money solves everything.
SunRocket? Skylab? Both came down.
I was affected by the SunRocket flame-out.
However I researched that they were referring folks to Teleblend. Since they use the same router, I was able to get back to taking calls IMMEDIATELY.
I suppose now all that remains is contacting my Atty Genl about the remainder of the $199.
VoIP deserves better
there are great voip plays out there -- e.g. Lingo and Net2phone. Pity this whole mess is likely to set the segment back.